Digital documents play a key role in helping people exchange knowledge within organizations, but knowledge and knowing are a social phenomena. A knowledge ecology arises any time there is a community of individuals who are exchanging and creating knowledge. There is an interplay between these processes and what is valued in the community, how it is to be used, and how it is communicated.The study of knowledge ecologies has evolved in two directions. On the one hand, research work has addressed the modeling of phenomena exhibited by knowledge ecologies, such as the mapping and mining of the interrelationships embedded in the vast set of documents circulating in an organization, and patterns of their use. For example, Huberman and his colleagues have derived a number of laws of the web. [E.g., Huberman, B., Pirolli, P., Pitkow, J., Lukose, R. "Strong Regularities in World Wide Web Surfing" Science 1998 April 3; 280:95-97 (in Reports); Huberman, B. and Adamic, L. "Growth dynamics of the World-Wide Web" Nature 401, 131 (09- 09-1999) (brief communications).] They have validated their laws via empirical studies based on records of millions of clicks performed by people as they search and browse the web.On the other hand, an equally important body of work has addressed socio-technical design of technologies and service components in support of knowledge processes. Participatory design, and computer-supported collaborative work are two of the approaches to this problem. O'Day et al is one example of an exploration of social-technical interaction. [O'Day, V. L., Bobrow, D.G., Shirley, M. "Network Community Design,: A Social Technical Design Circle" CSCW V7 Nos 3-4 "Special Issue on Participatory Design, edited by J. Blomberg and F.. Kensing] The papers in this minitrack contribute strongly to our current understanding of knowledge work in communities and the technologies that may be leveraged in its support.The first paper, by Antonietta Grasso, Jean-Luc Meunier and Christopher Thompson describes how a new mix of information technology and hardware can be harnessed to improve knowledge sharing practices in an organization while respecting current work practices. Starting from ethnographic results that show that previous predictions concerning a paperless future were premature, they present a novel paper interface to a workplace recommender system. Currently being implemented, this system has the potential to change the way teams exchange knowledge.Mark Ginsburg contributed a paper that presents both a model of document management for knowledge ecologies and a technological instantiation of the model. His model takes into account the lifecycle of a document in an organization, from creation to publication to access to obsolescence. Notably, the document is treated as a living object that evolves as it comes into contact with readers, in particular through reader annotations. He describes a multi-agent approach to implementing his model of a document management system that is potentially open to evolution in agent technologies.The last paper in this session is an in-depth empirical study of a virtual team-based organization conducted by Birgit Lemken, Volkmar Pipek and their co-authors. Their role was both that of observer and technology consultant. They found that the importance of trust, personal relationships, common goals and organizational culture was central to knowledge sharing in the virtual organization they studied. However, they also found that due to recent rapid growth in the organization, social relationships were no longer sufficient to ensure knowledge sharing. By participating in an internal working group for knowledge management, the authors were able to help shape new technological vehicles for knowledge exchange. The working group's recommendations were likewise grounded in the practical considerations of the working environment, in particular the technological inertia and barriers to use that were revealed in their study.These three papers taken together highlight the complementary elements necessary for the study and support of knowledge ecologies: modeling; empirical study of working organizations; the creation of novel information technologies; and elicitation of socio-technical methodologies for enhancing knowledge sharing.